Ameren Cos.. in Illinois and Missouri are among the first electric utility companies in the nation to offer power outage information on mobile devices. Called ameren.mobi, it is available to Ameren’s 2.4 million electricity customers in Illinois and Missouri.

Ameren.mobi can be an important part of any preparedness plan because this new service offers customers the comfort of being able to report a power outage from a mobile device and provides statistics organized by county and ZIP code to users of BlackBerrys, Palm Pilots, iPhones and other mobile devices.

“Our customers are increasingly dependent on mobile devices for Internet access,” said Thomas R. Voss, Ameren Corp. president and chief executive officer. “This technology addresses that need, while acknowledging that in an extended outage, customers are often away from home when the lights come back on. Thanks to ameren.mobi, they can check their outage status from wherever they might be.”

Visitors to www.ameren.mobi also may check the status of power outages at specific locations simply by entering the telephone number associated with the location’s account. Ameren.mobi expands on the company’s “Storm Center” Web site offerings, on www.ameren.com, which includes maps that display power outage locations in near-real time, plus county and ZIP code outage data.

Since the launch of outage maps on Ameren.com in 2005, the company has steadily increased its Web site offerings to provide customers more and more information, including the ability to obtain the customer-specific outage information that is also now available through ameren.mobi.